Challenge Authority Research Articles

Ethnography?

This essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research—participant observation—to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action. Four core aspects of participation observation are discussed as long duration (long-term engagement), revealing social relations of a group of people (understanding a group of people and their social processes), holism (studying all aspects of social life, marking its fundamental democracy), and the dialectical relationship between intimacy and estrangement (befriending strangers). Though the risks and limits of participant observation are outlined, as are the tensions between activism and anthropology, it is argued that engaging in participant observation is a profoundly political act, one that can enable us to challenge hegemonic conceptions of the world, challenge authority, and better act in the world.

Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

Developing graduate attributes in an open online course

AbstractIn an increasingly connected world where solving complex problems is not possible by solitary experts, educators and learners need opportunities to develop ways of thinking that allow them to engage with the dynamic and complex situations that arise in the world. The development of graduate attributes has been suggested as one way in which students can be prepared as active agents of social good. However, there are significant challenges with respect to developing these graduate attributes. This paper argues that the use of authentic learning in the design of open online courses may provide a structure for educators to develop generic graduate attributes.The use of collaborative technologies that are informed by authentic learning enables new forms of communication that allow students to fully engage with the academic process in ways that are difficult to achieve with traditional, classroom‐based teaching methods. This study made use of a blogging platform to create a collaborative open online course using principles of authentic task design in order to develop graduate attributes in undergraduate physiotherapy students.The study used an interpretive, qualitative design that gathered data via focus group discussions. Transcripts were analysed inductively in order to determine categories, which were then analysed in relation to the graduate attributes of the institution in which the study took place. Student discussions suggested that they had developed at least some components of generic graduate attributes, including an approach to learning that was personal and internally motivated, the ability to consider alternative points of view and acknowledge different perspectives, the confidence to challenge knowledge and authority, and skills as empathic communicators.

THE EXCESSIVE USE OF FORCE BY MEXICO CITY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES: CORRUPTION, NORMAL ABUSE AND OTHER MOTIVES

Although several factors have been cited to explain the excessive use of police force, its relation to corruption has yet been little explored. This is a serious omission when dealing with law enforcement agencies in which corrupt practices are both widespread and deeply ingrained, as is the case in Mexico City. On the basis of an analysis of 575 complaints regarding violations of detainees’ right to physical integrity received by the Mexico City Human Rights Commission between 2007 and 2011, many troubling patterns involving the use of excessive police force emerge, including: deeply-rooted and historicallyconditioned ways of policing; a form of moral retribution or “punishment” for individuals who resist arrest or challenge authority; poor disciplinary oversight; and lack of professional training (and competence) in resolving conflicts. Above all, the use of excessive force by Mexico City law enforcement agencies is linked to divergent forms of corruption, including extortion, crimes and the misuse of police authority to resolve private matters, among others. In order to address these problems, it is first necessary to recognize their diverse nature and their complex relation to disciplinary structures, accountability and culture.

Beyond Pedagogies of Repression

At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job, and pedagogy as more than teaching to the test. Against pedagogies of repression such as high-stakes testing, which largely serve as neoliberal forms of discipline to promote conformity and limit the imagination, critical pedagogy must be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crises of agency, politics, and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. Education must mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to important social issues and alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy.… At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy.… In a world that has largely abandoned egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority, resist the notion that education is only training, and redefine public and higher education as democratic public spheres?<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Power and conflict: the effect of a superior's interpersonal behaviour on trainees' ability to challenge authority during a simulated airway emergency.

A key factor that may contribute to communication failures is status asymmetry between team members. We examined the effect of a consultant anaesthetist's interpersonal behaviour on trainees' ability to effectively challenge clearly incorrect clinical decisions. Thirty-four trainees were recruited to participate in a video-recorded scenario of an airway crisis. They were randomised to a group in which a confederate consultant anaesthetist's interpersonal behaviour was scripted to recreate either a strict/exclusive or an open/inclusive communication dynamic. The scenario allowed trainees four opportunities to challenge clearly wrong decisions. Performances were scored using the modified Advocacy-Inquiry Score. The highest median (IQR [range]) score was 3.0 (2.2-4.0 [1.0-5.0]) in the exclusive communication group, and 3.5 (3.0-4.5 [2.5-6.0]) in the inclusive communication group (p=0.06). The study did not show a significant effect of consultant behaviour on trainees' ability to challenge their superior. It did demonstrate trainees' inability to challenge their seniors effectively, resulting in critical communication gaps.

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Government Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media: The Case of Iran (2009)

Residents' reluctance to challenge negative hierarchy in the operating room: a qualitative study.

Our aim was to clarify how hierarchy influences residents' reluctance to challenge authority with respect to clearly erroneous medical decision-making. After research ethics approval, we recruited 44 anesthesia residents for a high-fidelity simulation scenario at two Ontario universities. During the scenario, an actor, whom the residents were told was an actual new staff anesthesiologist at their university, asked the trainees to give blood to a Jehovah's Witness in contradiction to the patient's explicitly stated wishes. Following the case, the trainees were debriefed and were interviewed for 30-40min. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the text was coded using a qualitative approach informed by grounded theory. Qualitative analysis of the participants' interviews yielded rich descriptive accounts of hierarchical influences often characterized by fear and intimidation. Residents spoke about their coping strategies, which included adaptability, avoiding conflict, using inquiry as a method for patient advocacy, and relying on a diffusion of responsibility within the larger operating room team. Study results showed that hierarchy played a dominant role in the functioning of the operating room. Participants spoke of both the positive and negative effects of such a hierarchical learning environment. The majority of participants described a negative perception of hierarchy as the norm, and they employed many coping strategies. This study provides insight into how a negative hierarchical culture can adversely impact patient safety, resident learning, and team functioning. We propose a theoretical model to describe challenging authority in this context.

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

What Leonardo missed: a lesson for today

Alice : There’s no use in trying. One can’t believe in impossible things. The Queen : I dare say you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Lewis Carroll was not the only philosopher who has observed, if in this case obliquely, that scepticism of received wisdom is important to the advancement of knowledge. Indeed, it could be argued that significant advance in understanding rarely occurs without an obstinate refusal to accept what one has been taught. Such behaviour is hazardous, as Galileo discovered when he proposed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Today it may lead, at least, to difficulty in getting grants and publishing. Most of us start out in life believing what we are told, be it fairies, Father Christmas, or God. Soon enough we learn scepticism, discarding at least two of these and perhaps rationalizing the third. But after a decade or two of education filling our heads with facts some of us begin to lose our habit of questioning; it takes a bold student to challenge authority. Later, we start to realize that much we were taught is incomplete or wrong. Only the most adventurous will start to test this for themselves; it is easier and safer to swim with the current. Some years ago, while I was preparing a lecture in commemoration of William Harvey, …

Challenging Authority During a Life-Threatening Crisis

Background Effective operating theatre (OT) communication is important for team function and patient safety. Status asymmetry between team members may contribute to communication breakdown and threaten patient safety. We investigated how hierarchy in the OT team influences an anaesthesia trainee's ability to challenge an unethical decision by a consultant anaesthetist in a simulated crisis scenario. Methods We prospectively randomized 49 postgraduate year (PGY) 2–5 anaesthesia trainees at two academic hospitals to participate in a videotaped simulated crisis scenario with a simulated OT team practicing either a hierarchical team structure (Group H) or a non-hierarchical team structure (Group NH). The scenario allowed trainees several opportunities to challenge their consultant anaesthetist when administering blood to a Jehovah's Witness. Three independent, blinded raters scored the performances using a modified advocacy–inquiry score (AIS). The primary outcome was the comparison of the best-response AIS between Groups H vs NH. Secondary outcomes included the comparison of best AIS by PGY and the percentage in each group that checked and administered blood. Results The AIS did not differ between the groups (P=0.832) but significantly improved from PGY2 to PGY5 (P=0.026). The rates of checking blood (92% vs 76%, P=0.082) and administering blood (62% vs 57%, P=0.721) were high in both groups but not significantly different between the groups. Conclusions This study did not show a significant effect of OT team hierarchical structure on trainee's ability to challenge authority; however, the results are concerning. The challenges were suboptimal in quality and there was an alarming high rate of blood checking and administration in both groups. This may reflect lack of training in appropriately and effectively challenging authority within the formal curriculum with implications for patient safety.

Challenging authority during a life-threatening crisis: the effect of operating theatre hierarchy

Effective operating theatre (OT) communication is important for team function and patient safety. Status asymmetry between team members may contribute to communication breakdown and threaten patient safety. We investigated how hierarchy in the OT team influences an anaesthesia trainee's ability to challenge an unethical decision by a consultant anaesthetist in a simulated crisis scenario. We prospectively randomized 49 postgraduate year (PGY) 2-5 anaesthesia trainees at two academic hospitals to participate in a videotaped simulated crisis scenario with a simulated OT team practicing either a hierarchical team structure (Group H) or a non-hierarchical team structure (Group NH). The scenario allowed trainees several opportunities to challenge their consultant anaesthetist when administering blood to a Jehovah's Witness. Three independent, blinded raters scored the performances using a modified advocacy-inquiry score (AIS). The primary outcome was the comparison of the best-response AIS between Groups H vs NH. Secondary outcomes included the comparison of best AIS by PGY and the percentage in each group that checked and administered blood. The AIS did not differ between the groups (P=0.832) but significantly improved from PGY2 to PGY5 (P=0.026). The rates of checking blood (92% vs 76%, P=0.082) and administering blood (62% vs 57%, P=0.721) were high in both groups but not significantly different between the groups. This study did not show a significant effect of OT team hierarchical structure on trainee's ability to challenge authority; however, the results are concerning. The challenges were suboptimal in quality and there was an alarming high rate of blood checking and administration in both groups. This may reflect lack of training in appropriately and effectively challenging authority within the formal curriculum with implications for patient safety.

Nearer, My God, to Thee

Nearer, My God, to Thee

Deception and Death in Medical Simulation

Medical simulation requires, by definition, a certain degree of “make believe.” The mannequin is not a real person, the scenario is not really happening, and no patients are either helped or harmed. Successful education in the simulated setting depends on skilled facilitators who can effectively per

Visualizing politics in African sport: political and cultural constructions in Zimbabwean soccer

Football in Zimbabwe represents a variety of socio-economic and political interests, but has also become a means of engaging in dissent and resistance. Football has been a contested terrain – the state has tried to use the game as a means of achieving social control, but it has also been a critical medium for the expression and communication of dissent. In Zimbabwe, subordinate groups have developed forms of social and political representation in a sporting context to challenge authority. Soccer has also been a site for visualizing political contestation, where the visual becomes a means of making politics. Through soft-power discourses rooted in soccer, opposition political movements in Zimbabwe not only gained visibility but also acquired significant political and cultural capital. Football fans in Zimbabwe have used colours, signs and symbols to make political statements and to engage in political action. Football’s visual elements ensured political visibility and promoted safe and creative ways of engaging in politics under repressive conditions.

When Prisoners Take Over the Prison

There is a general tendency for social psychologists to focus on processes of oppression rather than resistance. This is exemplified and entrenched by the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Consequently, researchers and commentators have come to see domination, tyranny, and abuse as natural or inevitable in the world at large. Challenging this view, research suggests that where members of low-status groups are bound together by a sense of shared social identity, this can be the basis for effective leadership and organization that allows them to counteract stress, secure support, challenge authority, and promote social change in even the most extreme of situations. This view is supported by a review of experimental research—notably the SPE and the BBC Prison Study—and case studies of rebellion against carceral regimes in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Nazi Germany. This evidence is used to develop a social identity model of resistance dynamics.

Teach Them to Challenge Authority: Educating for Healthy Societies – By Gregory S. Prince

Teach Them to Challenge Authority: Educating for Healthy Societies – By Gregory S. Prince

Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-Invention of America, 1760–1800 , and: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (review)

Ireland, Philadelphia and Re-Invention of America, 1760-1800. By Maurice J. Brie. (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2008. Pp. xix, 363. Cloth, $65.00.)John Wilkes: Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. By Arthur H. Cash. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 482. Illustrations. Cloth, $37.50.)Reviewed by Andrew ShankmanSome momentous developments occurred during last third of eighteenth century, and John Wilkes was certainly part of them. Arthur Cash has written an enjoyable biography of libertine, civil libertarian, and popular symbol of protest. Cash's treatment seeks to remind those who might have forgotten that Wilkes was eighteenth century's principal champion of free speech and a free press and primary reason for end of general warrants, warrants for arrest that did not need to name parties charged. Cash's book, in part, seeks to explain how a Whig functionary became May 1763 . . . what in English history is called a (118).Cash re-creates bizarre, self-indulgent, and usually scatological circles in which Wilkes was happiest. These circles included leading lords, gentlemen, and cultural luminaries such as Diderot, Dr. Johnson and Boswell, Smollett, Garrick, and Hogarth. One of pleasures of book is to keep track of household and near-household names Wilkes knew. Assuming that readers of J ER know why Wilkes matters - and probably give a lecture about every other year in which liberty-loving colonists eat 45 dishes at public dinners and drink 45 toasts from bowls weighing 45 ounces - let me suggest some thoughts that will also lead to Maurice Bric's treatment of Irish immigrants and radical politics in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia.A bit too often, Cash presents Wilkes as agent of Whiggish progress: Since time of Charles II, he writes, the whole of political activity had been contest for control of state between king and his ministers on one side and privileged gentlemen of Parliament on other. Now common folk had entered into play (162). And Cash quotes with full approval from a 1963 study: The transference of political authority from government and law to people and law may be dated from cases revolving about North (133). In fact, it's more interesting to see Wilkes's escapades hearkening simultaneously forward and backward. To be sure, Wilkes became a symbol for radicals and reformers because subjects of Britain's limited constitutional monarchy expected a great deal more than pre- 1688 subjects did. In addition, eighteenth-century print culture and its robust public sphere provided Wilkes with opportunity to act as something of an independent agent stirring waters to better his position and challenge authority. Wilkes could be Wilkes in large part because of modern opportunities available to private men to speak directly to public and to chase popularity.But Wilkes was also a minor Whig and creature of Pitt/Chatham. Pitt and Wilkes's more immediate patrons, such as Earl Temple, could use him to say things in North Briton that they wanted said, but that were inconvenient for them to say about king and His Majesty's intimates. In starting North Briton, Wilkes operated in a venerable tradition occupied by royal critics such as Elizabethan pamphleteer John Stubbs, who protested Anjou Match on behalf of leading privy councilors. How unique was Wilkes when as far back as 1580s members of Parliament and Lords Mayor of London (a position Wilkes eventually occupied) led, at secret behest of crown advisors, violent protests against embassies of Catholic monarchies? Even Protector Somerset knew advantages of popularity and appeals to angry crowds and tried to deploy some of riots often called Kett's Rebellion to awe rivals at court. Pamphleteers and rowdy crowds were, in complex and not unambiguously edifying ways, part of nobles' and gentlemen's high politics for far longer than Cash allows. …

Disruption, yet community reconstitution: subverting the privatization of Latin American plazas

Latin American scholars have recently discussed the privatization of urban public space. A fundamental aspect of this process is the disintegration of communities because it often targets and affects a peculiarly Latin American kind of public space: the plaza. Plazas have traditionally functioned as cultural centres in Latin American cites. They are central meeting points for political groups, sites of civic expression and public resistance, as well as places to purchase relatively cheap goods and services. Plazas are, therefore, sites in which families, neighbours, and political organizations mingle, interact, and also challenge authority. This paper uses these sorts of insights on public space in Latin America to develop a conceptualization of the plaza as a community centre. However, the multiple practices and interactions that occur in these forms of public space have been disrupted by state-led strategies which seek to privatize and sanitize public space, thereby disrupting—or even destroying—the community centre. I use primary materials on Mexico City’s Historic centre and its plaza to explore the ways in which this specific type of urban public space has been affected physically and symbolically by a regeneration scheme known as the Programa de Rescate.

Whatever Happened to the Marvelous Importance of the Unimportant?: A Plea for Putting Today's Baseball and All-Sports Mania in Proper Perspective

Keynote Speech to the Fifteenth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 15, 2008 I was moved one of Bill Kirwin's last acts as NINE conference organizer was to ask me to deliver this year's keynote address. have heard so much about Bill this week, and I for one can never hear enough stories about him because he was such a rare combination of mind and heart, spirit and humor. At the risk of repeating some stories you have already heard, I remember one time here at the convention he mentioned that as a baseball-loving boy growing up in Boston he dreamed of being the Red Sox batboy but his father discouraged him, citing an urban legend: Son, you have to be an orphan to be a Boston batboy. I also smile I think of how Bill relished telling the story of a road trip that his minor league hockey team in Germany took to Austria and how some of his teammates thought they were going to Australia. During my last phone conversation with Bill after the 2007 World Series, he made the astute observation that Toronto catcher Gregg Zaun could make a good manager one day because he told a Canadian TV audience before Game 1 of the Series that if Colorado starter Jeff Francis hid the baseball well, the Rockies would do all right, but if he didn't, look out! It was a prophetic remark because Francis got bombed by the Red Sox and the Series never really got competitive. I'm sorry that Bill isn't around to comment on a less fortunate statement by Gregg Zaun, his recent belated explanation for being named in the Mitchell Report. Responding only via e-mail and thus able to avoid eye contact, Zaun claimed that he wrote a blank check for five hundred dollars to Jason Grimsley to pay off a basketball bet, adding that he was a generous fellow who often wrote blank checks to people. I can imagine Bill's bemused reaction Zaun explained his continuing allegiance to Grimsley, who was not only a key baseball steroid conduit but also the loyalist who once tried to hide Albert Belle's corked bat. We were both old-school, Zaun said, when it came to clubhouse hierarchy and the way the game should be played. (1) Don't worry, I am not going to launch into yet another finger-wagging, hand-wringing diatribe against the destruction of baseball's purity (that we all should know by now was never that pure to begin with) and the ruination of the game's hallowed records (that, in my opinion, have been compromised since the expansion of 1961 anyway). But I do have a public health concern about steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs on the major league level, not to mention the danger of a possibly near-epidemic situation on the schoolboy level that must be addressed. I don't have an answer for these problems, and I don't think anyone has for an issue that goes to the core of a pervasive winning is the only thing philosophy that has spread throughout our culture. My theme tonight may be less morally urgent but I think equally pertinent to the current state of affairs in baseball: Whatever Happened To the Marvelous Importance of the Unimportant? I have lifted the phrase from the opening chapter of Leonard Shecter's The Jocks, an expose written nearly forty years ago by one of the charter members of the so-called chipmunks, irreverent New York sportswriters who brought the challenge authority mindset of the 1960s to the ballpark. Known primarily for his outstanding work as the editor of Jim Bouton's Ball Four, Shecter, who sadly died from leukemia in 1974, opened his book telling the story of an argument that raged among some of his baseball-loving friends about how Pete Gray, the St. Louis Browns' one-armed outfielder in the World War II years, caught and threw the ball. Back and forth went a spirited discussion about Gray's technique in playing the field with only one arm, a glove, and a stump. The argument turned the most persuasive fellow convinced everyone that Gray caught the ball in his glove, threw it in the air while putting the glove under his stump, caught it again with his bare hand, and then quickly threw it back to the infield. …